I'm curious if any new releases are on the horizon, and if there are future plans for newlisp in general. Love the language and programming in newlisp, I only wish it were a more general purpose platform / language, but I know it's not in the cards.

There will be 10.7.4 development release this summer with a new, simpler more transparent way to organize and distribute files. A new stable release of that would be done in fall of this year. Feature-wise it will be almost identical to current 10.7.3 development release, which is mainly a bug-fix release to stable release 10.7.1.

The Java bases IDE will be in a separate package and is on the way out. Except for minor bug fixes, it has not been updated since Java version 1.6 and shows many problems when trying to compile on later Java versions. It also shows mayor problems when running on macOS (startup and utf-8 handling). Of course anybody is welcome to update it and distribute it.

newLISP executables for different platforms will be distributed un-packaged as will loadable modules. The idea is to simplify installation and make it more transparent. Many people will just download an executable and none or few loadable modules.

What do you mean with "more general purpose platform / language"? Isn't newLISP already general purpose and available on many platforms? What are you missing?

I'm curious if any new releases are on the horizon, and if there are future plans for newlisp in general. Love the language and programming in newlisp, I only wish it were a more general purpose platform / language, but I know it's not in the cards.

To my knowledge, I don't know any lisp-like scripting language which is more general purpose than Newlisp. And yet I have been trying some user-friendly Scheme implementations and a few Common Lisp. Even if they have indisputably many interesting and useful features, none of them are so concise, light and handy as Newlisp. Frequently I can't help coming back to Newlisp, in spite of a personal preference for more functional programming, with tail call optimization, lexical scope, and so on, as in Scheme for instance. But moreover, we can sometimes apply all that in Newlisp too (tco with trampoline, lexical scope with contexts, etc.)